Suburban mayors, cops discuss Riverdale crime

By Jeremy GornerJanuary 30, 2011

Riverdale Mayor Deyon Dean says crime has increased each year in his town since he moved there in 1993.

Riverdale’s crime rate has gone up because of the teardowns of various Chicago Housing Authority complexes in recent years, which led tenants to move to Riverdale and other neighboring suburbs, Dean said Sunday.

Although he didn’t have statistics to back up the claim that the former CHA residents have increased crime, Dean said “our programs in our community have to come up to par to deal with the issues of the individuals that are moving into our community.”

“A lot of these people are not bad people, but when they come here if there’s no jobs, if there’s no resources then they have no alternative but to turn to crime,” he said.

Dean’s remarks came Sunday shortly before he and mayors from several neighboring suburbs and police officials held a public meeting to discuss a recent crime wave in the area.

These crimes included a home invasion at a Riverdale apartment last Wednesday, two sexual assaults in the suburb earlier this month and the fatal shooting of Olubusayo Awomolo, a graduate student the University of Illinois at Chicago, in Dolton in November. With the exception of the sexual assaults, arrests have been made in the other two cases.

Although Dean said there has been an increase in Riverdale’s crime rate, his police chief, William McHenry, said he could not quantify whether there is an uptick because those numbers won’t be available until later in the year.

“I can’t speak to specific numbers of the upswing. But we have all been aware of increased amounts of robberies, burglaries and crimes here in the south suburbs,” McHenry said.

When Dean and other mayors at the meeting expressed the belief that much of the crime in the south suburbs is caused by people from Chicago, Ald. Carrie Austin, whose 34th Ward covers an area of the city’s far South Side that borders Riverdale, initially said she “took offense to that,” garnering several chuckles in the room.

“They did not are just come from Chicago. But, nevertheless, we are all plagued with the same crime,” Austin said. “Because my ward is plagued with the same activities as their (towns) are.”

But Austin said the belief shared by Dean and the other mayors share is valid. “And if we don’t work together… because it ain’t like something over there didn’t come to Chicago…we have to work together in order to rid these things in our communities.”

The officials said more police officers and other resources are needed on the streets to accommodate any influx of residents into the south suburbs. Capt. George Bowman from the Phoenix, Ill., Police Department said funding is a key problem.

“Most of us out here are low tax-based communities looking for jobs for our citizens. Most of it is not coming,” Bowman said. “We try to get it. We try to upgrade our equipment, our vehicles. State representatives claim that they’re going to do it for us. But they fall short on what they say they’re going to do most times. We need help.”